Award winning, bestselling author Neal Shusterman visits Coal City High School

Author Neal Shusterman, who has penned over 30 novels, visited Coal City High School on Wednesday to talk to students about his newest book and the writing process.

Shusterman’s newest book is “Courage to Dream,” but he’s also well-known for novels like “Game Changer,” “Everlost,” “Everwild” and the award-winning “Challenger Deep.”

“I’m here today to talk to you about reading and writing, and everything that goes with it,” Shusterman said. “But mostly I am here to talk to you about my latest book, ‘Courage to Dream’.”

“Courage to Dream-Tales of Hope in the Holocaust” is Shusterman’s first graphic novel, and it explores the Holocaust through a collection of stories.

Shusterman’s visit was arranged by Librarian Allison Peterson, who submitted the school for consideration as a stop on his current book tour. The visit was sponsored by the high school’s student council and included select students from across the Illinois Central Eight Conference.

“When I use the word brilliant, I don’t exaggerate,” Peterson said. “Awards and honors aside, what is so refreshing about Mr. Shusterman’s work is that when he writes for you, he doesn’t talk down to you or patronize you, he knows you’re too smart for that. His books deal with mental health issues, death, drug addiction, climate change, and a plethora of other topics that too often the adults in your lives don’t want to or won’t speak honestly with you about.”

Shusterman said “Courage to Dream” is a labor of love, something he’s cared about for a long time. I started years ago when talking to students about a story collection he wrote called “Mindstorm.”

One story inside “Mindstorm” was set during the Holocaust, which prompted a student to ask what the Holocaust was.

“To think there are people out there who don’t know what happened in Nazi Germany in World War II. it was too much to believe,” Shusterman said, noting in that one question the realization came to him that as survivors of the Holocaust are dying, there are fewer to tell their stories of those dark days in 1940s Europe. “It’s up to us to tell their stories. We have to keep the memory of the six million Jews and millions of others that were murdered by the Nazis during World War II.”

Shusterman decided to contribute stories so people could know and understand what the Holocaust was and how to relate to it, penning a story about the Holocaust in the style of the stories he likes to write.

“I like to write stories that are science fiction,” Shusterman said. “I write stories of fantasy. I like to write stories that bend reality in one way or another, even if they don’t it into some genre. The Holocaust is such a dark subject you don’t even think of something like fantasy or science fiction in relation to that.”

One story comes from a piece Shusterman wrote early in his career called “He Opens a Window,” the tale of three sisters hiding from Nazis with a kindly old woman. The woman tells the girls they must never leave the room they’re being kept in and they must never look out a window in case someone sees them and reports them to the Nazis.

“So their whole lives are in this room, but one day this strange light comes peering out from underneath a curtain and they attempt to look and when they do they don’t see the streets of the city before them they see a different world, a world they could escape to,” Shusterman said.

Despite the warning, they’re discovered by the Nazis, though they’re gone when the Nazis break into the house and tear away the window curtain. The girls escaped into another world.

Shusterman said the story’s message is that there’s hope within darkness, and he started to think about different aspects of the Holocaust that he wanted to address. He came up with five stories that represent the theme and work together.

From there, Shusterman fielded questions from the kids: He said his first draft is handwritten and his second draft is typed, because that allows him to rethink every word on the page. By the time he’s prepared to submit his work to a publisher, he’s at a point where he can no longer think to make the work better. That’s usually around draft six, and then the publisher reviews it and makes changes of its own.

“Nothing is ever done the first time you write it whether you are a student or a writer, it takes revision, constant revision,” Shusterman said. “So you should never really expect things to be done the first time.”

Shusterman wrote his first book at 18-years-old, submitting it to 30 different publishers and getting rejected by all of them. It took until his third book at 22-years-old when a publisher picked it up.

He had to write the first book to be a good enough writer to write the second and I had to write that second one to be good enough to write Shadow Club, my first published novel,” Shusterman said. “With everything you write you get better.”

Shusterman said his next work will be a pandemic story, but it’s not about COVID-19. It’ll be about a “happy virus” that makes things “All Better Now,” which is the title. He said that book will be released one year from now.